Page:Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539 volume 1 (1905).djvu/12

vi Meanwhile, Italian students have not been idle. Twenty years ago a learned Mantuan ecclesiastic, Canonico Willelmo Braghirolli, made a careful study of Isabella's correspondence with Giovanni Bellini and Perugino, and published many of the letters relating to these artists. But he too died before his time, leaving her life still unwritten. Other well-known scholars, Ferrato, Bertolotti, Campori, Signor Vittore Cian, and Cavaliere Stefano Davari, the present Director of the Archivio Gonzaga, have turned their attention to different aspects of the theme, and have published studies on the Gonzaga princes, or on the scholars and artists attached to their court. Above all, Dr. Alessandro Luzio, the present Keeper of the State Archives of Mantua, and his former colleague, Signor Rodolfo Renier, have devoted years of patient and untiring labour to the examination of the vast mass of Isabella d'Este's correspondence, amounting to upwards of two thousand letters, which had been fortunately preserved. During the last fifteen years these indefatigable workers have published a whole series of interesting articles and pamphlets containing the results of their researches, as well as one valuable volume, in which the intercourse between the courts of Mantua and Urbino, in the lifetime of Isabella and her sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, is fully described. In an essay which Signor Renier contributed to the Italia, fifteen years ago, he informed his readers that he and Dr. Luzio would shortly publish a monograph on the great Marchesa, but these distinguished scholars have as yet been unable to fulfil their promise, and the appearance of this important and long-expected work is still delayed.

Meanwhile, the following study, without